Cyrus

Being divorced was not something that John (played by John Reilly) wanted but he had to live with it, for 7 years. During those years John has not tried to date or find another woman to have in his life until his ex-wife Jamie (played by Catherine Keener) forces him to go to her party where he meets Molly (played by Marisa Tomei). From the first meeting, the two hit it off and everything seems to be going great again for John. Until he meets Cyrus (played by Jonah Hill) and starts to realize that he might have gotten him into more than he ever expected.
Cyrus completely fooled me in what I thought it was going to be. With a cast of John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, and Jonah Hill my first impressions was that I would be watching a comedy about a guy trying to cope with dating this woman while her adult son tries to put the kibosh on it. Though this is partly correct, John (the character) is trying to date Molly who does have an adult son who does not want his mother to date anyone. Thing is there wasn’t any comedy in this movie, at all.
The mood was set at the beginning of the movie, as it should be, but when I was expecting to be watching a movie where I would be laughing and having a good time with it, all I got was this depressed version of a movie. Cyrus is a serious movie that has tried to have some laughs in it but those moments that I think are supposed to be funny was actually a little creepy and weird. The closeness that Molly and Cyrus share with each other goes a little beyond the typical relationship between mother and son. It’s in this part of the movie where it is being shown how Molly and Cyrus act around each other that is supposed to be funny but is only odd and threw me off on how I was going to react to the movie.
Through out this film I was both disliking it and liking it. The acting is good, I think this is one of Jonah Hills best performances. Considering that until now all I’ve seen him in is comedies I wasn’t expecting to be seeing him in a role where he had to be a character that was somewhat realistic. He made me not like the character of Cyrus but at the same time I felt bad for him, but the down side is I never felt a connection with him or with any of the other characters.
What made me not like this movie the most was the cinematography. During the whole movie the camera operator would zoom in and out constantly from wide angle to close up back to wide back to close then to a medium shot then back to wide, are you getting the jest of it. This movement happened way too much and it got old really fast. Not only was there a whole lot of zoom shots in Cyrus but there’s a lot of camera movement as well. It’s not the shaking of a hand held camera, though there is some of that as well, but the movement of making the shot a little off centered. All this camera movement just got on my nerves to no end.
Another mild annoyance I had with the film was the idea of John going from meeting this woman and the next day becoming a stalker without her not thinking anything of it. Maybe this might just happen but I just don’t see a person not thinking someone who has followed them is not weird. But I just chalked it up to having the plot line moved along so the movie wouldn’t be slow. Oh but wait, it is a slow moving movie. It took too long for John to realize what Cyrus was doing and even longer for all the stories to tie together at the end. It was really easy to get bored while I watched this and with little music being played during the movie some of the scenes didn’t move along too well. I just couldn’t really figure out how serious this movie was supposed to be taken and if there had been a few changes made to it, like speeding up the flow, having a few more laughs, and adding some music this would have turned out to be a different movie.